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Orion: Zero Knowledge Proof with Linear Prover Time

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Advances in Cryptology – CRYPTO 2022 (CRYPTO 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13510))

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Abstract

Zero-knowledge proof is a powerful cryptographic primitive that has found various applications in the real world. However, existing schemes with succinct proof size suffer from a high overhead on the proof generation time that is super-linear in the size of the statement represented as an arithmetic circuit, limiting their efficiency and scalability in practice. In this paper, we present Orion, a new zero-knowledge argument system that achieves O(N) prover time of field operations and hash functions and \(O(\log ^2 N)\) proof size. Orion is concretely efficient and our implementation shows that the prover time is 3.09 s and the proof size is 1.5 MB for a circuit with \(2^{20}\) multiplication gates. The prover time is the fastest among all existing succinct proof systems, and the proof size is an order of magnitude smaller than a recent scheme proposed in Golovnev et al. 2021.

In particular, we develop two new techniques leading to the efficiency improvement. (1) We propose a new algorithm to test whether a random bipartite graph is a lossless expander graph or not based on the densest subgraph algorithm. It allows us to sample lossless expanders with an overwhelming probability. The technique improves the efficiency and/or security of all existing zero-knowledge argument schemes with a linear prover time. The testing algorithm based on densest subgraph may be of independent interest for other applications of expander graphs. (2) We develop an efficient proof composition scheme, code switching, to reduce the proof size from square root to polylogarithmic in the size of the computation. The scheme is built on the encoding circuit of a linear code and shows that the witness of a second zero-knowledge argument is the same as the message in the linear code. The proof composition only introduces a small overhead on the prover time.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Yuval Ishai for helpful discussions and valuable feedback on the paper. The material is supported by DARPA under Contract No. HR001120C0087, the NSF award #2144625 and the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity (CLTC). Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of DARPA, NSF or CLTC.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, USA

    Tiancheng Xie & Dawn Song

  2. Texas A &M University, College Station, USA

    Yupeng Zhang

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  1. Tiancheng Xie
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  2. Yupeng Zhang
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Correspondence to Dawn Song .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. New York University, New York, NY, USA

    Yevgeniy Dodis

  2. University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

    Thomas Shrimpton

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Xie, T., Zhang, Y., Song, D. (2022). Orion: Zero Knowledge Proof with Linear Prover Time. In: Dodis, Y., Shrimpton, T. (eds) Advances in Cryptology – CRYPTO 2022. CRYPTO 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13510. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15985-5_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15985-5_11

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